Monday, July 21, 2014

Snakes In The Garden Of Eden

UPDATE DEC 2014: The final expose on the lies of Megan Griffithsand her movie Eden.This is a long but amazingly-researched and thoughtful article by The Stranger's Jen Graves, who was one of the people who originally voted to award Megan GriffithsThe Stranger's "Genius Award". A must-read about how sex trafficking lies are created and unquestioned, until it's too late. In this article, the movie Eden is finally shown as the complete fraud that is really is.

Let’s talk about Seattle filmmaker Megan Griffiths. It will be a fairly one-sided conversation, you understand, because
she won’t talk to me. She won’t talk to anyone – at least, not about the subject
at hand, which is her breakthrough movie, “Eden.” But somebody connected with
that movie has told a lot of big lies about sex workers, and I really want
to know who.

The story begins in 2012, when Megan Griffiths co-wrote
and directed Eden. The film was billed as true story presenting the reality of
sex trafficking in the US, and a graphic and harrowing account it was. In the
mid-nineties (so the story goes), a young Korean-American woman named Chong Kim
was kidnapped by an international ring of sex traffickers, held captive, raped,
tortured, was witness to several murders, and along with hundreds of other
kidnapped women and girls, forced to be a prostitute. After some time, she made
a daring escape.

The real-life Chong Kim then went on to became a
highly-visible professional spokesperson for anti-trafficking campaigns, and so
it was that Seattle producer Colin Plank got her and Megan Griffiths together to
make Eden. Eden was released at SXSW to huge critical acclaim, and went on to
garner multiple awards and fawning reviews. Megan Griffiths gave several
interviews together with Chong Kim, strongly emphasizing that the movie was a
true and accurate portrayal of Kim’s experiences and about the reality of sex
trafficking within the US. (Here and here.) All of the publicity materials and all other spokespeople for Eden did likewise.

Fast-forward to now: in the wake of the Somaly
Mam scandal about faked trafficking stories, people are suddenly examining the
stories told by other professional anti-trafficking activists more closely.
Around June 4, 2014, Breaking Out, an anti-trafficking organization that Chong
Kim was a board member of, publicly accused Ms. Kim of fraud. This
organization, Breaking Out, says that Chong Kim was never a victim of
trafficking, and that she completely invented her story in order to get money.
They have also produced court documents indicating that in 2009, Kim was
convicted of a felony charge, Theft By Swindle, for the amount of $15,000.

Basically, everything that Eden says about sex
trafficking is a lie. (It’s certainly not the first time a movie about sex
trafficking has been based on lies. Remember the movie “Taken”, with Liam
Neeson? The man whose real life experience it was supposedly inspired by was
later arrested for fraud. Here, and here.) No one but Chong Kim can really know what happened to
Chong Kim, and she is free to tell her story as she wishes. But as the creators
of Eden were quick to say, Eden is not just a story about one woman. Sex
workers around the world are organizing and fighting for our civil and human
rights, and Eden is a piece of propaganda specifically crafted to fight our
movement.

Here’s why: While adult consensual sex work is definitely
not the same thing as sex trafficking, there is no distinction made between the
two in law, or in anti-sex worker rhetoric. So from a law enforcement point of view, when one speaks of “fighting
trafficking” what that means is “arresting whores.” Some anti-sexwork campaigns
claim to focus on arresting clients, but the vast majority of people arrested
for sexwork are the workers, and they are not dangerous international
gangsters. They are usually women and transgender people, predominantly people of color, and they’re usually poor.

Interestingly, all the cops in the movie Eden were
also bad guys who were in league with the traffickers. If the main character of
Eden had come in contact with any non-crooked cops, she would have been arrested
and very probably imprisoned. But all
the spokespeople for Eden seemed to feel strongly that tougher laws and more
arrests is what we need to combat the mythical many-headed hydra of sex trafficking.

Eden also had a somewhat murky financial relationship with a number of anti-trafficking NGOs. When these organizations speak
of “sex trafficking” what they mean is: ANY exchange of sex for money, even if
it is between two adults and completely voluntary. No one, they say, can really
choose to do sex work willingly. People who think
they are doing sex work willingly are victims of “false consciousness” and
must be rescued from their own folly. By force, if necessary.

Eden is to the sex industry what “Reefer
Madness” is to marijuana legislation reform. It’s a titillating sexploitation
movie, purposely created for a neoconservative agenda of arresting more people
and controlling sexual behavior. It is a feel-good film for a sexual police
state, pernicious rubbish used to legitimize stigma and state-sponsored violence
against sex workers. It perpetuates the misery of people who are trapped
between poverty, a right-wing Christian anti-sex agenda, and the
prison-industrial complex. Eden should never have been used to solicit
charitable donations and get lucrative grants. It should very definitely not be
used to sway voters, influence public policy or government funding, or to
direct the focus of law enforcement.

In spite of repeated requests for comment, no one
connected to the film will make any statement in response to these allegations.
(Griffiths did publish one Tweet on saying she was “deeply concerned” about the allegations, but nothing more.) If they stand behind their work, then why won’t
they speak? I believe that Colin Plank
and Megan Griffiths knowingly perpetrated a fraud with the movie Eden. They
showed negligence of, if not actual disdain for, the truth. What they have done
may not rise to the level of legal fraud, but it is certainly a moral one. And
it’s a fraud that is still harming sex workers.